Joe Peters (12 page)

Every night before going to bed Mum had the same routine. She would get Ellie and Thomas up for a wee because otherwise they were likely to wet their mattress, and she began to include me in the ritual too. She would waken us up by shouting at us and dragging us out of bed by our hair at about midnight. She was always drunk by that time of night and the alcohol would have fuelled her anger and resentment towards us, making it impossible for her to resist hitting Thomas and me.

‘Get!’ she would shout and we would have to scurry to the bathroom to avoid the slaps and kicks she would try to administer along the way.

The effort and inconvenience of it always seemed to stress her out, making the veins stand out on her forehead and her eyes go all bloodshot. It was like having the Incredible Hulk towering over us as we tried to do our business. If Amani was there, he would be waiting for her in bed, which was a disgusting thought in itself, and she would have no patience with us, eager to get back to him. Her breath would stink of alcohol as she pushed her face into ours and bellowed her abuse. I would go first and she could never resist slapping me round the head when I finished and walked past her back to bed. Thomas always had trouble getting the wee to come
with her standing over him, screaming at him to hurry up.

‘Do you think I’m standing here for my fucking health?’ she would yell. ‘What’s the fucking problem with you?’

I would pull the sheets up over my head to try to block out the sound of my little brother’s screams as she whirled him around the bathroom and the landing by his hair, swinging his feet off the ground and then letting go of him, sending him bouncing off the walls. By then I had learned the knack of making myself hit the walls quickly because I knew she found that satisfying. Thomas wasn’t as good at it and sometimes just flopped onto the floor, so she would pick him up and do it again and again until she got it right.

One night she was so drunk when she came to get us up she lost her balance and fell over while she was chasing Thomas around, banging her own head on the wall, which pleased me. I could even hear Larry quietly chuckling on the other side of the bed. Seeing his chance, Thomas took it and made a run for his bedroom while she was still down and we all fell silent, knowing that now she would be really mad. She pulled herself unsteadily back to her feet, swearing that this time she truly was going to kill him. I was frightened that she really would so I climbed back out of bed and tried to shield him from her, shaking my head wildly as
she bore down on us, as if that would have any effect on her.

‘What the fuck are you doing out of bed, you little bastard?’ she demanded.

She whacked me around the head and grabbed me by the cheeks, throwing me across the bedroom floor as if I weighed nothing at all. She then lifted Thomas by the throat, dragged him out onto the landing and hurled him down the stairs. I could hear his little body hitting every step on its way to the bottom. I knew exactly how much that hurt from all the times I had been sent tumbling down into the cellar. Then it went eerily quiet for a few seconds before I heard Amani shouting at her angrily.

‘What the fuck have you done? It’s everywhere.’

‘Oh, it’s only blood for fuck’s sake,’ Mum screamed back at him before they disappeared into another room and I couldn’t hear what they were talking about any more.

Ten minutes later I heard the sound of an ambulance approaching, siren blaring, and screeching to a stop outside the house. The front door was opened and I strained to listen to what was being said downstairs.

‘He lost his balance on the landing,’ Mum was telling them in her reasonable voice and they seemed to be accepting her story without any argument.

Mum’s sister Pat was staying with us that night and she agreed to go in the ambulance with Thomas. Pat
visited from time to time and didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with the way Mum treated us; I suppose that’s the way she had been brought up herself by their mother and father. An hour or so after the ambulance took Thomas away the phone rang and I could hear Mum answering it. I could tell from her tone she was talking to Pat.

It sounded to me as though the police hadn’t accepted her story quite as easily as the ambulance men had, because she said ‘The police are coming round here? Now?’ I could hear her telling my aunt what she should tell Thomas to say when they questioned him. I couldn’t make out all her words because Barry was snoring.

When he heard the police were on their way Amani left the house fast, pulling on his clothes as he ran out the door. Once he’d gone I heard Mum’s footsteps approaching our bedroom. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep but she grabbed my hair and pulled me back out of bed.

‘Get down to the kitchen,’ she ordered me.

I obeyed as quickly as I could, not wanting to be thrown down the stairs as Thomas had been. I could see blood splatters on the steps and across the floor and walls in the hall. Mum followed me into the kitchen and went to a drawer, taking out the biggest, sharpest knife she could find. From the look on her face I felt sure that this time she was going to kill me as she had always promised
she would. Her face was contorted with anger as she came towards me. She grabbed hold of me and pressed the blade hard against my throat. I couldn’t stop myself from shaking even though I was terrified I would cut myself on the sharp edge if I moved so much as an inch.

‘I’m only going to say this once,’ she hissed. ‘Do you understand?’

I gave a tiny nod.

‘The police are coming to the house to ask questions about Thomas falling. I’m going to tell them that you and him got into a fight on the landing and you pushed him down the stairs. Do you understand?’

I nodded again.

‘Good boy.’

She took the knife away from my throat and put it back in the drawer. Then she made us both a cup of cocoa as though nothing had happened, as though we did this sort of thing together every night. She gave me a huge fake smile as she handed me the steaming mug to try to calm me down before they arrived and to stop me from shaking.

There was a knock at the door and Mum went to answer it, giving me one more warning. ‘Remember what I said.’

I nodded, and sipped cautiously at the hot drink. I could hear a police radio going off in the hallway as she brought them towards the kitchen. I listened to Mum
telling her story and she sounded so convincing I was sure they would believe her, as they always did.

‘Come into the kitchen and meet him,’ she said.

‘Hello, young man,’ the police officer said as he came in. He was tall and had a loud, deep voice. I glanced up at him and then bowed my head in shame at the lies I was about to have to corroborate. He repeated everything Mum had just told him.

‘Is that what happened?’ he asked.

‘He’s a mute,’ Mum explained. ‘You have to ask him questions that he can nod or shake his head to.’

‘Have you been fighting with your little brother, Thomas?’ he asked after a moment’s thought.

I nodded.

‘Did you push him downstairs?’

Nod.

‘Well that wasn’t very clever, was it?’

Shake.

‘I feel sorry for your mum and for poor Thomas. Do you realize that what you did was very serious?’

Nod.

‘Are you going to start being a good boy for your mum now?’ He gave me a stern look.

I nodded one more time. He shook my hand and said goodbye and I felt so angry inside I thought I was going to explode. If only I could speak. If only I had the ability and the courage to tell him that Mum was lying. She
showed him back to the front door, chatting all the way as though she had never done a single thing wrong in her entire life, and I carried on gulping my cocoa until she came back into the kitchen. I wanted to get as much of it inside me as I could before she took it away or threw it all over me.

‘Now get back to bed, you little bastard,’ she shouted the moment she came into the room and I scurried back upstairs past the bloodstains.

Thomas ended up having twenty or more stitches in his head that night and once more I had been shown to the authorities to be a violent, disruptive child, while Mum came out of it looking like some sort of long- suffering saint.

Almost nobody outside the family ever witnessed the violent side of Mum’s personality. She was a Jekyll and Hyde character – all sweetness and light to the authorities and an ogre inside her front door.

There was one exception – our neighbour Paddy. Paddy was from Ireland and drank as much as Mum did. I could never understand a word he was saying but I knew he hated Mum because he would shout at her from outside when the drink had made him brave enough, calling her a ‘big fat witch’. Mum had beaten him up several times but he never seemed to learn from his mistakes, his courage bolstered by the Guinness and whisky. One night, soon after I had been released from
the cellar, we were all woken up by the sound of him shouting up at the bedroom windows from the street. I could make out Mum’s name amongst his slurred, drunken ramblings and I heard her getting out of bed, going downstairs and opening the front door. Larry jumped up and rushed to the bedroom window to see what was happening.

‘Go on, Mum,’ Larry cheered. ‘Holy shit, she’s beating him up again.’

I could hear Mum’s voice now, drowning out Paddy’s shouts. ‘You Irish bastard, I’ll give you something to knock on my door about in the middle of the fucking night.’

‘Come and look at this,’ Larry told Barry. ‘Hurry up.’

Barry bounced out of bed to take a ringside seat, but I didn’t move. I didn’t want to watch because I knew what she would be doing and I dreaded to think what was going to happen to poor old Paddy. I also knew that Larry and Barry would have given me a beating if I had tried to join in anyway. I could follow what was going on from listening to their running commentary and from the noises outside as Mum got Paddy round the throat and smashed his head through his own front window, leaving him there to bleed on the jagged edges of the broken glass.

‘Shut the window and go back to fucking bed,’ she shouted up to the boys before stamping into the house,
slamming the door behind her, and going back to bed herself as if nothing had happened. I don’t think we heard much more from Paddy after that night. He wasn’t exactly the type that could have gone to the police with a coherent story and insisting on pressing charges against her. If he had been, she wouldn’t have done it. Mum was too clever to get caught out in the wrong. No matter how much she drank, she always had a survival instinct that allowed her to stay out of trouble herself.

S
eptember rolled round and with it the start of a new school year. The authorities had decided that I was to be put into a normal class with other children my age, but assigned a special teacher to help me. I still couldn’t speak beyond making a few primitive and unintelligible sounds and I certainly couldn’t read or write. I was eight years old and all the other kids in the classes had been in school for three or four years by then and had developed mentally way beyond anywhere I could have got to sitting alone in my cell in the dark.

I knew a bit of what to expect at school from the stories that Wally had told me, but it was hardly enough to prepare me for the full-scale assault on my senses from every direction when I first went back out into the hustle and bustle of the real world. I had spent three years virtually on my own, in a world that was largely silent
and dark, and now I was out in the dazzling light of day, surrounded by crowds of kids all rushing around and jostling one another and laughing, with bells going off and teachers shouting out orders and books being thrown around. There were so many strange faces and so many new rules to learn in order to fit in and become part of it all. I must have looked like an odd, nervous little creature as I stepped through the school gates for the first time, with little idea what to expect. The kids all crowded up to me, curious to find out about the strange new boy in their midst.

‘Hi,’ they said, their faces all around me, staring, weighing me up, trying to judge me and work out whether I was going to make any difference to their lives. ‘What’s your name?’

‘He don’t speak,’ my brothers told them.

‘What do you mean, he don’t speak?’ They stepped back, regarding me with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Kids don’t like anyone different or strange. I could see it wasn’t going to be easy for me to make any friends.

Each school morning the routine I had to follow was the same. My clothes would be neatly laid out for me at the bottom of the bed and I would try to get dressed quickly so I didn’t drip blood anywhere from where Larry and Barry had penetrated me in the night. Once I was dressed I had to sit back in the corner of the room,
‘the dirty corner’ as they all called it, and wait until they told me what to do next.

Mum would call me down when she was ready and I would be allowed two pieces of plain buttered bread and a drink of water. The bread was served to me in my dog bowl and the water in a plastic beaker with my name on it because I still wasn’t allowed to contaminate any of the other crockery that the rest of the family used. I didn’t mind too much because at least it was regular food and I didn’t feel so starved all the time as I had in the cellar. Larry and Barry would escort me to school, a chore they obviously resented enormously. I would walk five or six paces behind with my head down, staring at the pavement, lost in thoughts about Dad, unable to get him out of my mind. I would count the paving stones as I went to try to distract myself from the sound of his voice inside my head.

‘Hurry up, Joe,’ they would grumble bossily. ‘Stop dawdling. We’ll tell Mum if you don’t get a fucking move on.’

Thomas and I weren’t allowed to do PE at school because then we would have had to get undressed in front of other people, so Mum would send in sick notes asking for us to be exempted. With me she claimed it was because of my asthma, with Thomas it was because of his ‘hole in the heart’. Apparently he had had a hole when he was born, but it had closed up pretty quickly
and never gave him any problems. She told the school it would be dangerous for him to do any physical exercise and the teachers chose to believe her. I was quite relieved she did that because I wouldn’t have wanted other boys asking questions about our scars and bruises. It didn’t occur to me that if the staff saw them it might alert someone to our plight, which might lead to us being rescued. No one had ever made any attempt to rescue us before and I knew Mum would always have a story ready to explain any marks that might have raised suspicions.